A diary of my experiences in Eve Online, an online game of Internet Spaceships, pew-pew, trading, thieving, back-stabbing, hunting and exploration

Friday, September 27, 2013

More Venture Plexing

I finished my previous Eve session a few jumps from home, so I decided to slow-boat it back, taking some detours. I'm in my cloaky Venture and I wanted to find more wrecks in plexes. I moved carefully between systems, using d-scan on gates before jumping to them and between that and the cloaking I was able to avoid a lot of situations. I also captured 2 small offensive plexes in Rakapas (Black Rise) and also a defensive plex that I shouldn't have bothered with. I did find a couple of wrecks here and there, but nothing exciting. The best find was an unlooted ship near a gate which yielded 3.4M in contents. I also found out that 2 Hobgoblin Is *can* kill a Caldari Navy ship that defends a plex, but with my crap lock range (about 8.2km) it takes a while and I had to give chase and re-lock several times. Luckily my Venture fit had no trouble with the incoming damage.

Faction Warfare Scoring

It's taking me an awfully long time to get my head around the scoring system of faction warfare. I understand plexes but the last piece that has, I think, fallen into place is the "contested" level. You can see this number, between 0 and 100% per star, in the Faction Warfare screen in a space station. I *think* that we are trying to drive this number to 100% in Caldari systems and keep it near 0% in Gallente systems (I'm on the Gallente team). Each plex you capture shifts the balance slightly (around 0.7%) and you can see this under the eve menu in the Faction Warfare screen

I think it would be nice to include some text on the plex-capture notification that said something like "As a result of your actions [System X] has moved from 20% contested to 20.7% contested." That would give me a sense of the impact my actions had, outside of just giving me loyalty points. ALSO an explanation of how the loyalty points were calculated, showing the multipliers/tier levels that were used. That would teach me how the system works and also give an incentive to shift those multipliers in my faction's favour.

Flashies!

Two notable events happened during my roam. I was still in gate cloak and about 10km away from it when a massive fleet arrived from elsewhere in the system. "Jump, you flashy bastards..." I muttered as they just sat there....not jumping. My gate cloak ran out and before I thought to turn my cloak back on, somebody locks me!

"I'm. So. Dead." I think to myself and wait for the rain of ammo. Which doesn't come. At least two ships have me locked. Under pressure, (and it actually FEELS like pressure doesn't it?!) I reach for anything in the overview and activate it. Oh joy, I picked SAME stargate that is now 20km away, and told my ship to jump through it. The Venture lazily turns around and the hamster in the engine runs as fast as it can. Now I'm very slowly heading CLOSER to the red/orange death-fleet. Instead of chosing a different destination and trying to warp out, seemingly frozen with fascination at how badly this has gone, I let it play out. It takes about 30 seconds for me to casually saunter into the jump gate...no shots were fired and I landed without incident on the other side. I cloaked up and sat for a few minutes to wonder what the heck just happened!

I'm going to check my log files tonight to see if it names the ship that locked me. I'm genuinely interested to know how come they didn't fire.

The other event was at the Rakapas gate in Pyne. When I arrived there I found a couple of wrecks so I headed towards them. During the couple of minutes it took to reach them there were at least four arrivals of ships hostile to each other and it was really interesting to sit on my perch about 70km off the gate and just watch. Ships came and went in small groups, a large pirate group in system came to the gate and left and there were several fights. I was able to salvage one more ship before heading back to Yvangier.

Lessons Learned

You can turn your cloak on very soon after landing at a gate

Plexing solo is pretty easy: Find a celestial (object you can warp to, i.e planet/asteroid belt) within d-scan distance of several plexes. Find one that is unoccupied and jump in. Move close the boundary (10k for novice, 20k for small, 30k medium), open d-scan and wait. If someone appears on scan, cloak up. Uncloak when they leave. If you're lucky you'll see some combat among other ships and get to loot/salvage them as well.